Earlier today (February 28th), Activision issued a Cease and Desist order against fan developer Phoenix Online Studios, who has been hard at work on The Silver Lining, an unofficial sequel to the venerable King's Quest series.

Visitors to the game's website, located at http://www.tsl-game.com are now greeted with the following letter from the development team:

In 2005, Phoenix Online Studios received a Cease & Desist letter from Vivendi Universal, the owners of the King's Quest IP, in regards to our work on The Silver Lining. We complied with the request, and over the months that followed, we were able to work out a non-commercial fan license with Vivendi that allowed us to continue our work on the game.

We have spent a lot of time recently reworking the material of The Silver Lining into episodic releases, with the first out of a planned five episodes completed, and submitted for review, and had hoped we would be able to bring our game to you, the fans, in the Spring of 2010.

Recently, however, ownership of the Sierra IP changed hands and became the property of Activision. After talks and negotiations in the last few months between ourselves and Activision, they have reached the decision that they are not interested in granting a non-commercial license to The Silver Lining, and have asked that we cease production and take down all related materials on our website.

As before, we must and will comply with this decision, as much as we may wish we could do otherwise.

We cannot say enough how much we appreciate the support we have had over these years from our fans. Without you, we would never have gotten this far. There would be no game to develop, and no one to develop it for. You have been amazing and steadfast, and we will always remember that and appreciate it more than we can say.

Sadly, after eight years of dedicated work and even more dedicated fans, The Silver Lining project is closing down.

What the future holds for us, as individuals or a team, we cannot say. We have an amazing development team, however, filled with talented and hard-working individuals, and we hope the teamwork and rapport we have developed will not go to waste. We hope that when we do know what the future holds for us, our fans will be there to enjoy what we can give them still.

Again, thank you all so much for everything. This has been a long and crazy road, full of more twists than we could have anticipated, but more triumphs and wonderful memories than we could have ever hoped for. And for that, to all of you and to everyone on our team, we will always be grateful.

As many of you will recall, back in 2005, Phoenix Online Studios was issued a Cease and Desist by Vivendi Universal for the development of King's Quest IX. After a lengthy petition and review process, Vivendi Universal granted the developer a limited non-commercial license to develop their game, which was renamed "The Silver Lining".

However, with Activision's recent acquisition of Viviendi Universal's properties, the fate of The Silver Lining came into question yet again. Today that fate appears to be sealed. The Cease and Desist issued by Activision calls for the immediate cease in production of the game as well as taking down all related materials from the game's website. At this time, the game website has been taken down and the bulk of the game's community forums has been taken down by the development team in an attempt to comply with the order (though efforts are being made to go through the forum in greater detail to comply with the order and put back into place any parts of the forum that do not directly pertain to the game).

The Silver Lining began it's development in 2002 and despite many challenges and hurdles, was on track for a summer 2010 release. A petition is available online at http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/savetsl/ which is petitioning Activision Publishing, Inc. to retract the Cease and Desist order and allow The Silver Lining to finish development and be submitted to Activision for an impartial review to ensure standards in quality and content.